LATEST STORIES IN LETTERS

Referring to the letter “stranded Pakistanis and vote bank politics” and also in response to the Pakistan Repatriation Council’s proposal presented in a symposium recently in Jeddah. I it should be noted that Rabita Trust is not going to build houses for repatriated stranded Pakistanis in Lahore or any major city, so the readers’ doubt that this “vote bank“ will be captured by the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) is not substantiated.

I suggest people who make such a false claim to read the Rabita Trust agreement which proposed to settle those quarter million Pakistanis in several remote cities of Punjab which is hardly going to change the political equation. Even in Sindh which took more than two hundred thousand repatriated Pakistanis in 1975, there was no change in the electoral arithmetic because they were scattered in many cities and did not become “vote banks” of MOM.

I think it is important for us that we don’t deny the basic rights of citizenship to any Pakistani. Just because we lost the war in 1971, so can we deny rights of those patriots who fought for unity of the country along with our army? — Mohammad Umair Khan, Jeddah